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Ulysses Update #1
I realized a flaw in my Ulysses Death March declaration, in that I can’t post about it today if I haven’t started it yet today. So I will begin posting about it tomorrow, but I will start reading it today. I actually did some math to figure out how many pages I needed to read in a day in order to finish it this month, and it’s a manageable amount so everything will be fine. So that excitement begins tomorrow. Prepare yourself.

Okay, that’s done. Moving right along…

On Writing
I started writing something yesterday. I fully intended for it to be a very short story of the flash fiction variety, but instead I just kept writing and by the time I stopped, I had a little more than 3,500 words so there’s no way it’s ever going to be flash fiction, but the best part is that I’m not done. When I finally dragged myself away from it last night and went to bed, I stayed awake for a few more hours writing a scene in my head and when I woke up this morning, by some miracle it was all still there in my brain. That never happens. I’m not going to say yet what it will be when it’s finished, because it might be a very long short story or it might be the longest thing I’ve ever written (more on that in a moment) but… how do I put this? I’m a little giddy.

Writing and I have a long history. I began writing pretty much as soon as I could form a sentence and I wrote my first book when I was 6. It was 15 pages long and included illustrations and I stapled all the pages together along the margin to create a book spine and I gave it to my best friend at the time as a present. Since then, I’ve kept going. I started a novel when I was 13 and when a published author came to my town as part of a reading series given by the public library, I approached him after he was finished talking and asked him if he would read the first 10 pages of my book. Looking back on this moment now from the vantage point of adulthood, I am impressed with my boldness and more impressed with the fact that he took those pages from my hands and asked, “So, what’s this about?” and I told him and he started to read. To this day I wonder if he thought I was some kind of dreamy middle-school hack when he took those pages from me and started to read, but I remember very clearly watching him read and being filled with so much nervous expectation that I thought I might blow up, and I remember his expression changing from a slight frown to something like surprise as he looked up at me and said “This is good. You’re good.” And I thanked him and he said “I mean it. Keep writing, kid.” That evening he gave another reading and I dragged my mother to it and she bought me a copy of one of his books (that I read but did not understand because I thought it was dark and dirty, though I read it again when I got older and liked it much more) and he signed it “Best wishes for your own stories,” and before I left that evening he said “Keep going. Don’t give up.”

Throughout high school I was always working on one project after another and I continued writing when I got into college, though the creative part was stifled by the Writing Long Papers About Books Written By Dead Dudes part and I didn’t write a story until 2001, in the fall. It was actually the same night the United States invaded Afghanistan, and I sat down and wrote a story about an Arab kid in junior high during the first Gulf War. It was almost pure autobiography. It was good. I was back.

I wrote pretty much nonstop for the next few years. I wrote poetry (my poetic career culminated in a twenty-poem collection that I put out in 2003 and though I wrote a few after that, I pretty much stopped after that book, and have felt absolutely no need to write a poem ever again) but I mainly focused on fiction. I wrote short stories and although there’s nobody in the world who’s a bigger critic of myself than I am, I think I got pretty good at it. I worked it out carefully: what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. And I worked on my style, slicing down every single bit of impulse until everything was planned, edited, and so tight that merely adding a word would cause everything to fall apart. I had honed it down to such a science that I could sit down and churn out a story, edited as I wrote, and then edited again, without thinking anything much about it. The act had become joyless and dishonest. I quit.

This past spring I started a fiction editing gig and a few days before the launch I didn’t have a submission that was ready to go, so in desperation I sat down and wrote something. It’s twisted. I ended up not needing to publish it because someone else came through at the last minute with something not so terribly bleak and I ran that, happily. (It may see the light of day yet. I submitted it to another editor who says it’s ready but I haven’t offered it for publication. I might though. This month, even. We’ll see.)

Anyway, writing that story reminded me that oh, I like writing. I’ve written little pieces here & there but nothing that was worth anything, and then there was yesterday. I started something else that I got 1,000 words into and then stopped because I hated it. I sat back for a minute and then wrote down a name of a character, and from there the story just started building, almost entirely on its own, it seemed. Characters sprung forth fully-formed and ready to go. The bits of dialogue sound like the way people actually talk. It’s funny in places and dark in others, and there’s a thread of sweetness running through the whole thing that I’m fighting an impulse to kill. Sweetness makes me cringe but that’s my own personality flaw, I think, so despite myself I’m going to let it play out and see how it goes.

I’m telling you all of this because I’m — oh dear — excited about this… whatever it is that I’m writing. That hasn’t happened in such a long time. I’m just writing, without beating myself up if every sentence isn’t some flawless sparkling gem. I can edit later but right now I just have to get it all out. In a way, I feel like I had to get through this long history with writing to be able just to write. I had to attack it joyfully with no real clue and I had to go through knowing too well exactly what I was doing to the point that everything lost its meaning. I am not a romantic about art. I believe there are creative spells and dry spells, yes, but I believe that just because there’s a dry spell there’s no reason not to have the discipline to make something anyway (my recent year of self-portraiture — that I hesitate to call art — taught me that lesson), but I also believe that things come when it’s time for them to do so. For me, right now, it appears to be time.

The story isn’t true, but it’s honest. I can’t ask for anything more.